During this time, what we might call a Urban Intelligence Industrial Complex (led by IBM, Cisco, General Electric, Siemens, Philips et al) has emerged and continues to try to insert itself into urban agendas; with little success, in comparison to the marketing spend, it must be said. One can imagine a quiet fading away of all those “Smarter Planet” promotional schemes soon, actually.

In the early days of the green building movement there was a lot of green wash going around. That is, early developers of buildings would throw a dash of low VOC paint here, and a compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) there and call it a green building. Most corporate, government and individual consumers had no way to distinguish the claims. The U.S. Green Building Council changed all that with the introduction of the Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification process. And the rest is history as standards like LEED and BREEAM in the UK have helped to create more transparency and clarity around what a green building is, and what it isn’t.

I feel that the Smart Cities movement is in the same stage of development as the building industry was before LEED was introduced. Cities can convert a few paper processes…